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Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Mavis Gallant Dies at 91

Let's take a moment and say good-bye to the incomparable short story writer Mavis Gallant, who died in Paris at age 91.

Her
postwar Paris was not the romantic landscape of so many American
writers, but the haunted gathering place of survivors of
mid-twentieth-century Europe's catastrophes--displaced persons,
prisoners of war, impoverished ex-pats. "There was also a joint past
that lay all around us in heaps or charred stone," she wrote
in her short story, "An Alien Flower." The streets "still smelled of
terror and ashes, particularly after rain. Every stone still held down a
ghost, or a frozen life, or a dreadful secret."

The Globe and Mail of her native Canada (she emigrated to Paris in 1950) well describes her particular gifts:

Ms.
Gallant had a journalist’s nose, a cinematographer’s eye and a
novelist’s imagination. She combined her technical skills and sensory
perceptions in the shrewdly observed and multi-layered short story, a
form she made her own. A specialist in writing about outsiders trying to
insinuate themselves into alien situations and cultures, her narratives
move in waves of dialogue, observation and lashing tension. Reading her
stories gives one a sense of a clock ticking, a door creaking open, or
of an emotional wound about to be inflicted.

Seek out her Collected Stories,
and be prepared for a sensory and emotional immersion. My favorite has
remained "In the Tunnel," with its enigmatic closing lines: "some
summer or other would always be walking on her grave." -- Barbara Bedway

is author of a dozen books (click on covers at right), including the new "THE TUNNELS: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill." He was the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher. Email: epic1934@aol.com. Twitter: @GregMitch

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